There's a word doing the rounds right now that brands need to sit with: slop.
It refers to the avalanche of low-effort, AI-generated, algorithmically optimised content that has flooded every feed, inbox and channel over the past few years. Fast, frictionless, forgettable. And Gen Z, the generation raised on short-form chaos, has started to actively reject it.
This is one of the more counterintuitive findings in our SS/27 States of Culture report. The same generation accused of a six-second attention span is building personal reading curriculums, paying for Substack newsletters, queuing for exclusive book clubs and rewarding brands that show their working. It's not that they're anti-content, they're just anti-slop. There's a difference, let me tell you how.
The shift makes more sense when you understand what's driving it. In a world where content is infinite and effort is increasingly optional, taking time with something signals something. Reading a 4,000-word essay. Watching a two-hour video essay. Finishing a book and having an opinion on it. These aren't just leisure activities anymore, they're now core identity markers. They say: I am someone who knows real things, not just TikTok things.
The numbers back this up. Book club events on Eventbrite grew by over 30% across 2025, silent book clubs (where people meet to read in silence before socialising) have more than doubled, and Substack crossed 5 million paid subscriptions with 35 million active readers. These aren't niche behaviours. They're signals of a broad cultural recalibration away from passive consumption and toward considered engagement.
People are building what the report calls self-imposed curriculums. Monthly reading themes. Museum circuits. Long walks with long podcasts. The goal isn't productivity. It's identity. Being someone with taste, process and genuine knowledge carries real social currency again.
It would be easy to picture this trend as a retreat into elitism. Expensive book clubs with long waiting lists. Cultural salons. Intellectualism as gatekeeping. And there's some of that, yes.
But the slop snob tendency is broader and more democratic than the elitist reading. It shows up in someone watching a three-hour documentary about a niche subject they'll never need. In a group chat thread that goes deep on an album's production history. In the recent Coinbase campaign that looked like a simple in-game recording but wasn't, the engineering and physical craft behind it was deliberately designed as part of the story. In the age of slop, effort itself becomes the product.
This is the key insight for brands. It's not that Gen Z wants everything to be long. It's that they want to feel the weight of the thing. The intentionality. The craft. Whether that's a hand-thrown ceramic mug, a handmade lighting installation, or a campaign that took genuine skill to pull off, the labour is the signal. Wretched Flowers, whose handmade lighting work celebrates lost ancient processes and craftsmanship, understands this instinctively. So does Tesco, whose behind-the-scenes process content became a campaign in itself.
Slop isn't just AI-generated imagery or low-budget ads. It's a posture. It's content that optimises for volume over value, that treats the audience as a metric rather than a person, that mistakes presence for relevance.
Gen Z has extremely well-calibrated slop detectors. They grew up inside these systems. They understand the mechanics of how content gets made and distributed, which means they notice when something has been produced by template rather than thought. And increasingly, they're making brand decisions on the basis of that detection. Around 40% of Gen Z say they're unlikely to engage with AI-generated content at all, and the number one thing they want brands to stop doing is publishing AI content without labelling it.
The backlash isn't puritanical, it's actually very practical to the evolution of culture. If everything looks the same and costs nothing to make, nothing stands out and nothing sticks. Slop is becoming its own kind of invisibility cloak.
The brands earning genuine attention from this audience aren't necessarily producing more content. They're producing better-considered content, and they're making the consideration visible.
Buffy's book swap events, run in collaboration with Mango, reframed the act of reading as a social and aspirational experience, intellectualism turned into an event, with fashion credibility attached. Coach's "Explore Your Story" campaign leaned into the romantic idea of personal narrative and self-authorship, speaking directly to an audience building their own cultural identity. The Tesco BTS (behind-the-scenes) process content worked not because it was glamorous, but because it revealed real effort and real people. That proof-of-human quality has become its own luxury signal.
Long-form content is also having a genuine moment as a brand channel. Not because attention spans have suddenly grown, but because audiences are self-selecting for depth. If someone has subscribed to your Substack, clicked into a 20-minute video essay, or shown up to a brand-hosted conversation, they are already invested. That's a fundamentally different relationship than someone who passively scrolled past your ad. The room is smaller but the people in it are actually there.
1. Where does effort show in what you make? Not for its own sake, gratuitous complexity doesn't land either. But somewhere in your process, your craft, your product or your storytelling, there should be something that takes genuine time or skill. Make it legible.
2. Are you treating your audience as a metric or a person? Slop is ultimately a respect problem. Content that optimises purely for volume signals that the producer doesn't think the reader is worth the effort of a real thought. Gen Z notices. The question isn't whether your content is good, it's whether it's good for the person receiving it.
3. What would you make if you couldn't measure it? Some of the most culturally resonant content from brands right now defies easy attribution. The slop snob era rewards brands willing to make things that exist because they're worth making, not just because they're measurable.
Like everything in Gen Z culture, slop snobs don't exist in isolation. The same person reading a 600-page romantasy novel and attending a literary salon will also send 40 unhinged memes in a group chat before lunch. Depth and chaos coexist. Always have. The point isn't to take yourself seriously, it's to take your craft seriously.
The full picture of this generation lives across all three tensions in our SS/27 States of Culture report: Faith, Mischief and Yearning. Slop snobs sits within Mischief, a quiet rebellion against the systems designed to keep people consuming passively. It's not po-faced or precious. It's a refusal to be sloppy about things that matter.
If you're trying to understand where this generation is heading and how your brand shows up in a way that actually earns their attention, the full report is worth your time. Download it here: SS/27 States of Culture, Gen Z Trend Report.
Make something worth making. They will notice.
